For more than forty years, Barbara has enjoyed a checkered career as a science writer, journalist, artist, and mental health counselor. She has written books and journal articles with basic scientists, physicians, and other health care professionals. Corporations have hired her to write and illustrate consumer education literature. She has worked on assignment for ad agencies, publishers, hospitals, private physicians, and government agencies such as the National Institutes of Health. She is also the sole author or co-author of over 100 books and articles.
Over her professional career, Barbara served as an adjunct professor at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, staff consultant and faculty member at the Mayo Clinic and Medical School, and manager of biomedical communications at Abbott Laboratories. In the early 1980s she took time off for graduate studies at Ohio State University, pursuing a major in social sciences research. After getting an M.S. degree, she enrolled in a psychology graduate program at the University of Florida, where she received an Ed.S. degree, with a specialty in the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory. Following a year as a counselor on two college campuses, Barbara returned to her writing career and founded MedEdit Associates in Gainesville, Florida. She ran this successful agency until she retired in 2000 to write about her own interests and ideas.
Currently, Barbara has three books in press: Your Secret Self—Understanding Yourself and Others Using the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory; Great Animal Escape Stories: True Adventures of Farm Animals; and Wild Dogs of the World. She is the anonymous author of a best-selling book about the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Since 2010, she has maintained a blog, “I Was Thinking,” on her website, BeaconStreetUSA.com. The blog focuses on interpretation of the Myers-Briggs test and gets over 30,000 visitors a month. The blogs are followed by thoughtful responses from over 200 readers.
Barbara volunteers as a pro bono writer for a number of nonprofit organizations: PLAN International, Jungle Friends Primate Sanctuary, WildCare of Oklahoma, Mill Creek Retirement Home for Horses, Humane Farming, Gainesville Pet Rescue, and others. For many years, she has also funded them as a private donor.
As an amateur musician, she started a weekly musical program at a preschool for low-income families near her home in Gainesville, Florida. Each week, she brought her accordion to school and played songs the children could sing, letting them experiment with her instrument afterward. She also founded the Gainesville Humane Society’s dog therapy program, taking her dog Rosie to a low-income nursing home regularly. The University of Florida’s Department of Journalism made a documentary film about their visits.
Barbara has traveled with groups of three to ten people to Vietnam, Thailand, and Ecuador, as a PLAN emissary. As an ecotourist, she has visited Europe on a bicycle tour and Alaska and Antarctica on small nature cruises. Her interests include kayaking, wildlife-watching, playing musical instruments, and service work for Alcoholics Anonymous, of which she is a member.
Born in 1932, Barbara grew up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. Her father was a firefighter and her mother a home economist. The author reports that her dad was introverted, judgmental and withdrawn, but protected her when she needed it. Her mother suffered from personality disorders and was mostly absent. Barbara had to find her own path to happiness and security after she left home. Perhaps her childhood sowed the seeds of compassion in her heart, because she has been a tireless worker for children, the elderly, and animals all her life.
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